Little girls, especially those inclined to kill people, should learn to
keep their footwear clean. It was, after all, a pair of bloodstained
Mary Janes that got Rhoda, the piano-playing, angel-faced murderess,
into such trouble in "The Bad Seed," the popular 1950's melodrama by
Maxwell Anderson.

Now Lizzie Gael, the 9-year-old in Hilary Bell's "Wolf Lullaby" at the
Atlantic Theater Company, is arousing suspicions by wearing a pair of
sneakers spattered in red. What is a mother to do?

The chilling fascination with children who kill obviously hasn't waned
in the four decades since Patty McCormack, as Rhoda, became a star
playing "Clair de Lune" over the screams of a man burning to death
offstage. The differences that separate Rhoda and Lizzie, however, are
more than a matter of shoe styles.

Say what you will about Rhoda, she was clearheaded: she knew what she
wanted and how to get it, even if it involved homicide. Things aren't so
easy for Lizzie, whose sense of self and reality are on the slippery
side. Similarly, the play in which she figures is far more reluctant to
categorize its antiheroine than Anderson's was. Rhoda was simply a
monster, the bad seed of the title; no one in "Wolf Lullaby" is quite
sure what to make of Lizzie.

Ms. Bell's 75-minute play, set in a town in Tasmania, is more intriguing
for questions it raises than for how it embodies them dramatically.
Although performed with the care and conviction that is the hallmark of
the Atlantic, which gave us "Mojo" and "The Beauty Queen of Leenane,""Wolf Lullaby" never quite catches fire.

The production, directed in a terse, elliptical style by Neil Pepe, does
have its genuinely disturbing moments, more effective for the quietness
with which they are executed. Yet there's an overall feeling of
dispassion and self-consciousness that keeps you at a distance, letting
you pick at the holes in the work's narrative logic.

Lizzie (played by Kate Blumberg, an adult) is the daughter of parents
who live apart. She is by no means the suave pretender that Rhoda was.
She has troubled dreams, a dark fantasy life and a slightly hysterical
manner. Her mother, Angela (Mary McCann), and father, Warren (Jordan
Lage), see her behavior as part of the usual growing pains, even when
she is picked up for shoplifting by a policeman (Larry Bryggman), who
points out that she has also strangled a classmate's canary. Their
dismissive attitude changes after a local 2-year-old is strangled to
death.

The questions the parents ask of themselves in the murder's aftermath
(Why me? What did I do?) are standard in dramas of kids gone bad. The
play's more provocative elements come from Ms. Bell's suggestions that
mother love has its limits and, even more daringly, that what Lizzie did
(if she did it) falls within the realm of a bullying and sadism common
among children.

Ms. McCann and Mr. Bryggman are especially good at tracing their
characters' respective paths away from and toward affection for the
child. And Ms. Blumberg really does seem to inhabit the tortured little
girl she plays, rather than talking down to her. The actors do not,
however, disguise the structural limpness of "Wolf Lullaby," which
includes a climactic scene in which Angela is asked to betray her
daughter in a way that has occurred already. It's as if the deliberate
fuzziness of the work's moral stance had somehow seeped into its
technique.

The production's most sensational (and effective) touches are its sound
effects, created by Donald DiNicola, which include macabre rhymes
chanted by a chorus of children. That juxtaposition of ghoulishness and
guilelessness is perfect for the Halloween season, which somehow seems
scarier than it used to. As "Wolf Lullaby" and the increasing number of
reports of homicides by children remind us, there's a slender line
between innocence and amorality.